Most people have heard of Russia’s Golden Ring towns, with their ancient churches, pretty lakes, and folk crafts. But there are other cities and towns worth seeing that have been investing in public spaces, museums, and other efforts to attract tourists. One of them is Tula, the home turf of Leo Tolstoy and a city rightly proud of its industrial heritage.
Tula has witnessed a massive overhaul of its city center, particularly the Upa River embankment near the kremlin, now a trendy park with overlooks, benches, coffee shops, and outdoor concerts in summer. The Tula kremlin will celebrate 500 years in 2020, so local authorities are set to restore ten more historic landmarks in the city center. (visittula.com)
Say “Tula” and Russians will think of two things, samovars and pryaniki – large honey-flavored biscuits made in various shapes (pryanik is often mistranslated as “gingerbread cookie,” even though the confection contains no ginger). Both are symbols of Tula, so of course the city center boasts museums devoted to both samovars and pryaniki.
Yet Tula’s most famous museum is the State Arms Museum. It is one of the country’s oldest museums and was previously located inside the city’s kremlin. It opened in the eighteenth century after Peter the Great ordered that Tula’s Armory (precursor to the still-functioning legendary Tula Arms Plant) preserve all its old cannons for posterity. Fifty years later, a collection of rare weapons was created under Catherine the Great. The actual museum did not open to the public until 1873, and since 2012 its extensive collection has been located in a new six-story building that also has a shooting gallery, where you can try your hand at firing a Kalashnikov or a sniper rifle. Part of the museum remains in the kremlin. (museum-arms.ru)
The town’s new Machine Tool Museum is located at the Oktava Factory, which produces sound equipment. The space features a multimedia exhibit about the region’s industrial heritage and its cultural impact, with video clips of actors reading from factory workers’ diaries, plus examples of actual Soviet-era machines, which today look a bit like dinosaurs preserved from a bygone era. The Oktava space is only in its second season, and its programs are still expanding, as more creative people are brought in, workshops and concerts are held, and lecturers are invited from other parts of the country. (oktavaklaster.ru)
Another interesting museum was opened by a group of cemetery explorers. Tula’s Vseksvyatskoye (All Saints) Cemetery is one of Russia’s oldest, and a group of volunteers teamed up to save its beautiful necropolises. The initiative grew into the Tula Museum of History and Architecture, which now has several locations, hosting art exhibitions and a permanent museum called “The Old Tula Apothecary” dedicated to pre-revolutionary pharmacies. The museum has not forgotten its origins, however: its guides still give tours of the Vsekhsvyatskoye Cemetery, including at night (bring a flashlight!). (tiam-tula.ru)
Meanwhile, the town has undertaken other projects in recent years to breathe life into crumbling factory spaces, such as the Likerka Loft in Tula – a former distillery – which has become a popular destination since its conversion and opening five years ago. The attractive red-brick complex is now full of shops, restaurants, and sculptures, including one of writer Nikolai Leskov’s famous Lefty putting a metal shoe on a giant steel flea. Locals refer to the 3.5-meter-tall sculpture as the “cyborg flea.” (vk.com/likerkaloft)
Once you tire of exploring Tula, hop on a marshrutka or into a taxi for the 30-minute drive to Yasnaya Polyana. Leo Tolstoy’s family estate has shrunk in size since he was the owner, but the vast grounds, which include his simple grassy grave in the woods, can still take some time to explore. You can only see the Tolstoys’ house on a guided tour, and it is usually rushed, due to the sheer number of visitors. Still, it can be pretty powerful to listen to an audio recording of Tolstoy’s voice while looking out his study window, followed by a walk through his apple orchard, or a horseback ride. The museum has a lot to offer, just like the rest of Tula. (ypmuseum.ru)
This summer, strange things have been happening with Vladimir Putin’s popularity. For months, the president’s trustworthiness ratings have been in steady decline, in large part due to the recent pension reform that raised the retirement age for both men and women. In fact, in May Putin’s trust rating sunk to a historic low of just 30.5 percent.
VTsIOM, the All-Russian Center for Public Opinion Research, has for years asked Russians the same question: “Which politicians do you trust?” Now, Putin’s name is being mentioned less and less often.
So what happened to the president’s previous, Teflon-esque poll numbers?
“I think the main reason is a lack of understanding about when we will start living better. What does it actually mean to live better? It means rising income. Statisticians say that for the past five years our incomes have been flat. And this seriously stresses people out. And, I would say, it surprises them. A difficult phase of the economic crisis ended in 2016… but over the past three years we have not really started to live any better.”
Asked to comment on the downward trend, Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said pollsters should “explain” how it could be that trust in Putin is falling even as his electoral rating (reflecting approval of his work as President) is not.
The next day, VTsIOM introduced a new method for measuring the public’s trust in Putin, and the numbers more than doubled, to 72 percent (surprise, surprise: how and when you ask a question can have a serious effect on the answers you receive). The new poll simply gave respondents a multiple-choice question, with Putin in a list of politicians. Lo and behold, most people chose him. This methodological sleight of hand was uniformly ridiculed by Russian internet users.
Pavel Durov, founder and owner of the Telegram messaging app (he also created the successful VK social network), has announced he is going on a fast, a cleanse designed to promote the emergence of creative business ideas. “I’m trying something more radical, with no food at all,” wrote Durov, a long-time vegetarian and adherent of a “straight-edge” lifestyle of no drugs or alcohol. He said that, if “new ideas” come to him, it would benefit all Telegram users.
This comes more than a year after Russian authorities formally ordered that Telegram be blocked in Russia, a move prompted by the company’s refusal to hand over encryption keys giving state security services full back-end access to the app’s data.
Prior to Telegram’s blocking, LinkedIn suffered a similar fate, and recently the FSB security service requested encryption keys from Yandex, Russia’s most popular search engine and internet powerhouse. Yandex later said it had reached an understanding with the FSB and assured the public that their personal data is safe, without explaining what sort of a solution was negotiated.
The list of internet-based services that have attracted the attention of the security services is growing. Most recently, dating app Tinder was added. And new bills restricting internet freedoms pop up nearly every month. Since the passage of new legislation in March, several people have been fined for “offending the authorities” with critical web posts.
For the first time, a Russian foundation has published the controversial 1939 Soviet-German agreement, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which established a policy of non-aggression between the two countries and secretly carved up Europe into spheres of influence on the eve of war.
The pact has long been known to historians, but its Russian text was never made public. Some pro-Kremlin pundits denied its existence, and any scrutiny of Moscow’s actions in the lead up to WWII has been increasingly seen as unpatriotic. A 2017 poll found that 17% of Russians considered the protocols to be a fiction, a number that had been 11% a decade ago.
The documents available on the Historical Memory Foundation website include the agreement and the so-called secret protocols that divided up Poland and the Baltic states.
The pact is often seen as precipitating WWII, as it allowed Hitler to focus on attacking Western Europe without worrying about potential military actions by the Soviet Union. Needless to say, such an interpretation (which most self-respecting historians accept) does not fit into the official narrative, which focuses only on the heroic sacrifices the Soviet Union made in defeating Hitler.
Alexander Dyukov, director of the foundation, laid out six possible paths Soviet authorities could have taken in 1938-39, concluding that the best scenario, in which the Soviet Union would have made a pact with France and Britain, was impossible: negotiations failed because of Britain, Dyukov wrote. So Moscow settled for the next least risky path, he argued: the non-aggression pact with Germany.
historyfoundation.ru/2019/05/31/pakt/
A Russian athlete, Kseniya Savina, has perhaps the strangest doping story of all Russian athletes currently disqualified from competing in connection with an ongoing ban resulting from accusations of state-sponsored doping.
Savina tested positive for doping last year while training in Kenya. So she began competing under a false identity – that of her Ukrainian friend Galina Syshko. Both women were from Crimea, and while Savina received a Russian passport after the peninsula’s annexation in 2014, Syshko did not: she had retired and was working as a coach.
Savina began running using Syshko’s Ukrainian passport to circumvent Russia’s disqualification from international competitions. She competed 11 times as Syshko, including three times after she had been disqualified for doping.
«Запрет — это как раз есть то, где человек свободен, потому что он говорит: это нельзя, а все остальное — как хочешь. Что такое право? Это и есть самая большая несвобода. Чем больше прав у нас будет, тем менее мы свободны, потому что право <...> это когда ты должен действовать, и только таким образом, как написано в законе.» “A ban is exactly what makes a person free, because the person says – this is banned, while everything else is as you like. What is a right? It is in fact the greatest absence of freedom. The more rights we have, the less free we are, because a right… is when you have to behave in the exact way the law says.”
-Senator Yelena Mizulina, author of many of Russia’s odious bans, giving a new take on freedom and the lack thereof. (Moscow Agency)
In 2018, Russians satisfied their sweet tooths with a record 25.2 kilograms of sweets per capita, up from 24.5 kilograms the year before. Experts aver that this is because chocolate is discounted more than other food items. (RBK)
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Russians living in Yekaterinburg, St. Petersburg, and Kazan harbor a particular dislike of the capital and its residents, according to a poll of 12 Russian cities. The top reasons given to explain this provincial hatred:
All of Russia’s money is in Moscow” (56%); Muscovites are snooty (24%); Muscovites don’t like people from other parts of the country (8%)
Despite the lack of love, 67% want to move to Moscow because of the opportunities it offers.(Zoom Market agency)
Only about half of Russians (51%) are employed in professions for which they were formally educated. What is more, 28% say they never worked in professions related to their degrees.
Of persons who work in other fields, 30% say it is because of the difficulty of finding relevant jobs, while 24% say it is due to lower salaries in their chosen field. Some 20% say they simply don’t like the jobs as much. (VTsIOM)
49% of Russians say they would stop or lessen their contact with a friend if they found out the friend was gay or lesbian. Another 45% say it would not affect their relationship. Only 8% of Russians say they have friends that are gay or lesbian, up slightly from 6% in 2013, while 89% say they don’t. (Levada.ru)
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